This is a fantastic study, and I've added it to my list of links for how to learn about voting methods (https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/how-to-learn-about-voting-methods-4e6c0e4d38d9). It's every bit as good as a similar study for the 2016 Presidential election (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352547793_Comparing_voting_methods_2016_US_presidential_election), and the fact that it focuses on a hotly contested nonpartisan election makes…

A bit over two years ago, I got in contact with Jameson Quinn to voice some concerns about how strategic voting was modeled in his Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulations. He responded back, asking if I’d like to coauthor a paper with him — an opportunity that I jumped on. That…

Materials for everyone, from complete beginners to experts — Unlike every other post on this blog, this one is designed to be accessible to people who have no prior knowledge of voting methods. If this is you, I suggest reading the articles in order (but you’re encouraged to poke around the sites I link to; there’s plenty of good…

Loosely speaking, proportional representation (PR) means having the preferences of the electorate be proportionately reflected in an elected body. These preferences can be about partisanship, ideology, geography, race, religion, or anything else a sizable chunk of the electorate deems important. …

A big selling point Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is that it’s tried and true; it’s used by major US cities like San Francisco and New York, and in Maine, Alaska, Australia, and Ireland. By contrast, Approval Voting is used in just St. Louis and Fargo, STAR Voting isn’t used by…

“How will this affect political culture?” — I recently wrote an evaluation of how much good we can do by working on voting methods reform as an entry for Open Philanthropy's cause exploration prizes. Two takeaways: First, adopting better voting methods matters a lot. …

Last year I wrote about the evidence from Australia on how third parties fare under Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), both the single-winner version, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and the proportional multi-winner version, Single Transferable Vote (STV). This year there was another election, and it gives us a lot more data…

A simple tool for evaluating strategic voting — Suppose there’s an election coming up. You’ve decided how good each candidate is and you’ve looked at some polls, so you have a decent idea of how likely each of them is to win. …

For any reasonable voting method, there are multiple strategies voters could use in hopes of gaining greater influence. However, we can put every strategy into one of three categories: Uniformly advantageous: Voters benefit from using this strategy regardless of how many other voters are also using it. Saturating: Voters benefit…